


The Signal

by Izzy_Grinch



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Gen, M/M, Psychology, Songfic, Three Dog sending supporting vibes thru his broadcast, for there's not much he can do, home is where someone awaits for you, retro songs, while his dear Wanderer is wandering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2016-12-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 03:21:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8781106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Izzy_Grinch/pseuds/Izzy_Grinch
Summary: There's the only thing which makes the Wanderer to keep moving and living and coming back - the person in the GNR building.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Сигнал](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8331358) by [Izzy_Grinch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Izzy_Grinch/pseuds/Izzy_Grinch). 



_«The roads are the dustiest, the winds are the gustiest, the gates are the rustiest, the pies are the crustiest, the songs are the lustiest, the friends are the trustiest way back home…»_

The Wastelands were devastatingly inhospitable and desertly uninhabited, despite the great loads of creatures, infesting this bleak, dull land, sick and abhorrent to its core. However, he had nothing at all to compare it with; those pictures, they were watching through the old projectors back in the Vault, always seemed to be something so unreal that it was much easier to imagine all the photographs as some sort of grape flavored mentats’ hallucinations, rather than the truth. Besides, the Vault itself was nothing but aseptically clean echoing walls: cold when pressing your forehead to their surface; cold when putting your palm on; cold even through the jumpsuit when leaning with your back.

However, choosing the one and only bad from between the bad and the worse, he’s chosen the polluted air; the dust, following his every step; the water, which makes his counter go mad; the piles of metal remains; the twisted skeletons of houses; the charred cars, all wizened like plastic pieces in the smoking dumps; the blood, coating in the sun.

Sun.

It awaits somewhere over the thickness of the smog, which hasn’t subsided yet through all these years, and it shines, and it warms, and tans his skin, and dries the icy sweat and his lips, salty and bitter, he’s licking from time to time. The salt of a missed punch in his jaw; the bitterness of the radioprotectors, rushing in his veins – these are the only tastes he has now, and he senses them more often than the mawkishness of Nuka-Cola or the vapidity of canned pork, feeling himself like one of the meat pieces, fished out from a tin to see the brave new world before disappear in someone’s mouth. He still remembers how his eyelids were struck by the blades of beams, his pupils probably shrunk to the size of the mark, left by the stimulator’s needle.

_«Pretty flowers need the sun, this applies to everyone…»_

He gave up the chameleon glasses once his eyes, sensitive and unfamiliar with the bright daylight, stopped to water in response to every damn glimpse in the muddy puddles; so he put his specs into the box, between his folded uniform, the number on which had been ousting his real name bit by bit, and the Tunnel Snakes jacket, almost new, with only its left lapel being smoothly cut off by the laser shot.

But it’s appeared to be impossible for him to give up the murmuring radio. Though, at first, he jammed the signal completely, too afraid to make a pretty easy target for thugs and spawns, while filling the neighborhood with 40’s hits. Then he flinched every time when all these radios in the abandoned abodes, where only the cockroaches chirr and the dying refrigerators hum, suddenly crackled with noises and coughed a surprisingly cheerful voice, sparkling with hope. Finally, he’s lowered the volume to its minimum and then has never shut the broadcasting again.

However, one day he woke up on the ferryboat to the heavy, suffocating silence. The berth was a few hours ahead; the engines were sighing gravely, fighting the river’s flow; the ship was moaning with its frayed and rusty hull; the night was full of sounds, but at the same time it was deadly mute, so he felt like losing his mind. Frankly, the fault was on him, for he hadn’t found a minute to fix the Pip-Boy after one yao-guai attack, whose fangs had clenched furiously on the hand, he was shielding his face with.

The rest of the sail he spent on the bridge, freezing of dampness and trying to get into talk with the captain, but their words faded away like the wind, straying in the President’s Monument shaft. The next couple of days in the ghost town seemed to be the damned eternity, as if he was small and helpless again, and trapped in the simulation of the better life, the only exit from which is – death.

_«Maybe you’ll think of me when you are all alone…»_

He wanders, spending the noon hours on the road, searching for something he doesn’t remember of anymore – fortunately, there’re always enough of the unexplored areas on his map, and he can listen closely and catch the juicy crumbs from the radio news to let them lead him right to the treasures, which are so necessary to survive. When nights come, he makes little bonfires somewhere in the bush, avoiding sleeping under the roofs or in the ruins of the most illusory desolated buildings, for there’s a pretty rare chance to meet a soul in the fields after the dawn, more horrifying than a deathclaw. Though even those creatures assault, only if you trespass the boundaries of their territories; he, however, has learnt well the ongoings of the wild Wastelands’ inhabitants.

He stares into the dancing fire, where the shapeless figures are melting and fading, and he listens.

_«I’m tickled pink, the moon is yellow, and I’m your fellow tonight…»_

But sometimes, leaving a sticky trace behind, he crawls in some sort of a hole in the wall, made of pale scattering concrete, then he grits his teeth on the belt, folded in two, and mends his open wounds, growing numb of the morphine injections. And if a tight haze thickens inside his head, forcing him to blink slowly and rarely, to slip down onto the cracked floor, there’s the only thing that keeps him conscious.

_«I say I’ll move the mountains, and I’ll move the mountains, if he wants them out of the way; crazy he calls me, sure, I’m crazy − crazy in love I’d say…»_

He walks up the stairs – there’re as many of them as he’s counted at his first visit. The fallen off flakes of stucco are breaking under his tractor soles; the guests are not common here. He unwinds his rag, which has been covering his face from sand, strong smells, and splinters of bricks, sprinkling around after the almost-deadly-shot. A dark stripe of dirt is stretching across his nose bridge, and he wipes it away with a sleeve, hands brown and coarse, mottled with white scars. He turns his bag inside out above the littered table, drops it beside the goods, for there’s nowhere to rush now, and comes to the threadbare DJ’s chair. The palm, which has been following every word of the dialogue between the man and the mic, changes its direction and lies onto the Wanderer’s hip, slips along the rough clothes, along the strap, onto his back, circling his waist, then pulls him closer, as close as it’s physically possible, and slowly releases him after a moment.

Afterwards he sprawls on the coach with his legs hanging from the greasy armrest and finally lights a cigarette. The smoke begins to stream up to the ceiling.

_«The love the liveliest, the life the loveliest way back home…»_


End file.
